This article is now out-dated. Rapidshare is back online in Mauritius, discarding the concept of orange applying Internet Censorship. It was probably a problem with their servers, or a broken thing somewhere.

Rapidshare.com can be pinged, can be trace-routed, albeit very slowly, but when loading rapidshare.com in a browser, you get a “page loading” thing (progress bar starts filling) then it freezes.

I managed to get 1 download going, but it failed after 7KB downloaded, with a miserable speed of 1.5KBps, which is lame.

This can mean 2 things:

- There are issues with the Rapidshare servers and they are doing some kind of maintenance.

- Access to rapidshare.com has been blocked by the local ISPs, or Orange.

I had a friend using Nomad’s network to try to access rapidshare.com and launch the same download I’ve been trying to get. No result. It was blocked too.

This is not a local DNS issue since I’m using OpenDNS. Trace-route to rapidshare.com works. If there was a blocking, the request would have stopped at the ISP, or maybe they are letting requests go through but block HTTP requests or something similar?

For now, I don’t know. I’m writing this article without having every fact, so take what you read with a pinch of salt. It might be censorship. Or it could be a simple server problem. Still, Rapidshare is unusable on Orange’s network.

Another weird issue. If you try accessing rapidshare.com via a proxy, it works fine. This is making me seriously consider censorship. Nothing confirmed yet. It might be that Orange started blocking access to Rapidshare to prevent heavy downloading or some kind of weird reason. If you want to check, go to YouHide and use it to access rapidshare.com.

However, if there is censorship in place, there will be an all-out war between Orange and Internet users. They are violating the basic philosophy of the Internet, which is the free and unrestricted flow of information. We can accept capping, but we can’t accept being censored and restricted like that.

I agree that Rapidshare has loads of illegal content, but also, loads of totally legal content. That doesn’t mean that it should be totally blocked. This is plain unfair. If there is indeed censorship, we could send an email to rapidshare, telling them that their premium users are being denied service in Mauritius, and we demand a refund? That should get their attention!

The Media Guru also wrote about this problem, so you might give his article a check.

More on this as I get updates… Nothing confirmed yet, remember this!

Ps. Sorry for the lack of articles on GeekScribes. Both Guru and myself are in exam period and will finish by end of May. So, if there are no frequent updates, you now know why.